Madoff's investment fund may 'never have traded'

London, January 17 (ANI): Investment fund managed by Bernard Madoff, the prime accused of a 50 billion dollar investment fraud, may never have carried trade transactions.

The Wall Street fund manager, the perpetrator of the biggest financial fraud in history, had been arrested and charged with securities fraud on December 11.

The 70-year-old's swindle was alleged to involve up to 50 billion dollars in cash and securities through Ponzi schemes, which involves paying abnormally high returns to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from the profit from any real business.

The allegation that not even a single share passed through his market-making business emerged after records of his broker-dealer, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, were put under scrutiny.

Herb Perone, a rep for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said that the investigation "showed no evidence of trading on behalf of the investment adviser, no evidence of any customer statements being generated by the broker-dealer."

It was claimed that Madoff had either been using an unlikely "third-party firm to process the trades for the fund or that he was not executing any trades at all", reports the Telegraph.

The Wall Street Journal had reported that many wealthy investors from all over the world had fallen victim to the fraud including wealthiest woman in the world and heiress to the L'Oreal empire Liliane Bettencourt, Alicia Koplowitz, the Spanish billionaire and director Steven Spielberg. (ANI)